Micheline Szwajcer Gallery

It’s hardly unusual for an artist to question contemporary society, but it is surprising to receive genuinely poetic yet straightforward answers. Days after seeing Alicia Framis’s “Remix Buildings,” her latest contribution to shaping a better world, I was still haunted by her propositions, which are fantastic in the truest sense of the word. These proposed interventions in the public domainshown in the form of color photographs of her maquettesare in no way cryptic, and they avoid the hermetic intellectualism and easy sarcasm that have become so commonplace.

Example: The Dam Square in Amsterdam has an exciting history. It was here that, in the late ’60s, a diverse group of revolutionary students, peaceful hippies, and left-wing intellectuals started a “revolution” that really did remake Holland. It is now hard to remember that, until then, Holland had been one of the most narrowly